Alcohol is the most popular recreational “drug” in the world.Drinking too much or even moderately can still ruin and damage your health. Check out the article we found at Mercola.
Do Drinking Patterns Make a Difference?
The BBC segment above investigates the differences between moderate drinking and binge drinking, using identical twin brothers as guinea pigs. They each drink 21 units of alcohol over differing time scales — one consumes them all in one night while the other has three drinks per day over the course of a week.
Twenty-one units amounts to three-quarters of a bottle of whiskey, two bottles of wine, or 10.5 pints of beer. The test continues for a month. Medical tests before and after assesses the physical effects and potential damage.
Overall, the tests reveal that alcohol consumption is quite detrimental in general, no matter how it’s consumed. The doctor was actually quite surprised at how bad moderate drinking was, considering it’s within the U.K. guidelines for alcohol consumption.
How Alcohol Ruins Your Health
Acutely, alcohol depresses your central nervous system, which slows down the communication between your brain cells. Your limbic system, which controls emotions, is also affected. This is why alcohol consumption lowers your inhibitions.
Your prefrontal cortex, a brain region associated with reasoning and judgment, also slows in response to alcohol, leading to more impulsive behavior and poor judgment.
At higher doses, your cerebellum, which plays a role in muscle activity, will also be impacted, leading to dizziness and loss of balance. Over time — even over as short a period as one month — alcohol:
• Increases liver stiffness
Which increases your risk of liver cirrhosis. In the film, after one month, the liver stiffness of the binge-drinking brother was increased from 3.9 to 4.9 — a 25 percent increase in liver inflammation that leads to cirrhosis.
The moderate-drinking brother fared nearly as badly. His liver stiffness increased from 3.9 to 4.8, so spreading the drinks out did not make any significant difference in terms of the liver damage caused by 21 units of alcohol per week.
• Diminishes the formation of memories
Due to ethanol buildup in the brain. This is why you may not remember what you did while you were drunk. Alcohol also causes your hippocampus to shrink, which affects memory and learning.
• Promotes systemic inflammation
The two brothers both had significant increases in five different inflammatory markers, although binge drinking caused a more dramatic rise.
Studies have shown even a single binge causes a dramatic rise in inflammation. In other words, your body reacts to alcohol in the same way as it reacts to injury or infection.
• Increases stress on your heart
Raising your risk for cardiomyopathy, arrhythmias, high blood pressure and stroke.
Blood alcohol levels spike two to three hours AFTER your last drink, which means it may occur in the middle of the night during sleep. This raises your risk of accidental death due to choking on your own vomit and/or suffering cardiac failure or stroke while sleeping.
• Significantly increases endotoxin levels
In other words, alcohol causes gut damage allowing bacteria to escape from your gut into your blood stream.
The film showed that bingeing caused significantly worse damage, suggesting one week between binges is nowhere near enough to heal the gut damage caused by high amounts of alcohol. That said, regular consumption also led to elevated endotoxin levels, suggesting 21 units of alcohol per week is too much, and “sensible” drinking limits likely need to be much lower. How low is still unclear.
These are just a handful of the physical effects of alcohol. In reality, alcohol affects every part of your body, as shown in this Healthline Infographic. In terms of chronic disease, studies have linked excessive alcohol consumption with an increased risk for poor immune function (which raises your risk for most diseases), pancreatitis and cancer.
Next Article: 7 Forms of Cancer All Related To Alcohol – Study Finds
Read Full Article: Even Moderate Alcohol Consumption May Be Far More Harmful Than Previously Thought
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